the prowicz family garden

a midwest prairie in summer

we hope you enjoy the photos and stories about our garden. we have only been at this exciting hobby for a year but we are having a great time. please feel free to leave a message in our guest book, we respond to all messages. thanks for visiting!

april 18, 2003

thanks for visiting our garden web site. we are really excited about the changes we have seen in our yard since we got bitten by the gardening bug last year, so this will probably be the most up to date part of our web site during the summer months. so please visit often!

this is our second gardening season. laura has kicked it off with a bang in march after absorbing much of the good advice in one of her new books, caring for perennials: what to do and when to do it (great book!). we are following the schedule in this book pretty much to the letter, to see if it really saves us time and energy. we will need it since we created many more beds than we have the time to manage ourselves.

considering that we were complete novices last season and making such mistakes as planting new plants long before last frost, overwatering, planting short plants in the back, tall plants in front and knowing zippo about fertilizer and soil we think we're ready for year two.

we have a lot of work to do this season. we started tons of seeds outside this winter using a new technique called winter sowing - it was so easy we figured "there is no way this is going to work!". but it did, and now we have hundreds of new baby plants to show for it. wonder where we are going to put them all?

we sowed prairie seeds last fall in the back behind our fence and in our front yard inside the picket fence. we ordered native prairie mixes for woods edge from two sources and sowed both of them. we can't wait to see what comes up and how it looks when it does.

we have a lot of rearranging to do and hope to get it all done in april instead of dragging the job into june this year. we have not stopped ordering seeds and are still sowing native annuals and perennials that don't require a dormancy period. we are creating a new bed using the lasagna method and have saved up old leaves, compost and dax's poop for the effort! it will be a woodland garden and we already have our shopping list ready.

most importantly our garden is comprised of only native plants (ok ok I acknowledge a weakness for hostas, ox-eye daisies and california poppies which are not native to cook county, illinois!). since we have found that really nowhere in our yard gets 100% sun, most of the prairie plants cannot be supported but we have included what we could and the rest are all shade-tolerant or woodland natives. even our pond will include only north american native plants.

we are hoping that ultimately our backyard will contain several different but complimentary small habitats that will attract wildlife.

speaking of the pond...finally this spring we got smart and hired a professional to finish up the hole in our back yard. you can see the pond in progress on our web site however completed pond photos will most likely be incorporated directly into our garden photo collections. have fun, browse around and enjoy the pictures. :-)

winter sowing - starting native plants from seed

here is a totally lazy, "don't have to rip your house up for it" way to start native plants from seed. using nature...naturally ;-)

pond in progress - creating a wetland

creating a wetland was a top priority. especially when our sump started running 24 x 7, turning our yard into a swamp for two months of the year.

family garden 2002 - the first season

information and photos of our native garden from spring/summer 2002 when we were just getting underway.

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